Hands-On Report--Sp@mX at Week 1

A little over a week ago we reviewed this spam-fighting application that is new to Mac OS X. Sp@mX, now at v3.0.7, automatically searches the headers of email that you designate as spam and then contacts the services that handled the email on its way to you, queries them for their abuse address, sends a complaint to that address and files a complaint with ther FTC. Friday night/Saturday morning marked our first week of use. So how is it doing?

The general answer is surprisingly well. Prior to our use of Sp@mX we got over 600 spam messages per day, sometimes up to double that amount. During our first week's use we got 2,523 spam messages, an average of 360 per day. That represents at least a 40 per cent reduction from 600 but it is actually more than that. On Saturday and Sunday we got another 505 spam messages, an average of 252, so the number of spam messages has continued to decline.

We did inadvertently report several list subscriptions as spam, got removed from their servers and had to re-subscribe. We also accidentally reported one client as a spammer because both Apple Mail's Junk Filter and Sp@mX thought her message was spam. It's difficult to carefully cull the spam folder with hundreds of messages in it. Fortunately, our level of spam is finally getting low enough to permit eliminating such mistakes.

This week we also began automatically reporting each spam message to the FTC (spam@uce.gov), a new feature that was added last week to v3.0.7. We'll report on the second week's results next week. [Bill Fox]